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Ro aims to bring its online COVID-19 screenings to all of the US this week

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If you feel like you have signs or symptoms associated with the coronavirus, you can complete Ro’s online assessment. If it seems like you may have contracted COVID-19, Ro will connect you with a US-licensed physician who will conduct a free video or phone evaluation and provide next steps. Ro does not provide a diagnosis or testing for COVID-19 — it’s leveraging its existing infrastructure to help people connect with physicians and find the proper guidance. The company uses telehealth systems for its men’s and women’s health services (Roman and Rory) as well as its smoking cessation program Zero.

Other companies like LiveHealth have been providing telehealth services for years, but it seems like most solutions aren’t specific to COVID-19 — patients simply set up a video call as normal. Alphabet’s Verily has an online screening tool, and Nurx does have a COVID-19 testing solution in place, though it has yet to launch. Nurx will focus on patients who have had direct exposure to the virus or who are experiencing symptoms, and will send at-home testing kits to those who need them.

Ro’s approach, meanwhile, seems to help fast-track people who think they may have contracted the coronavirus and quickly connect them with a healthcare provider. The company claims that using its system will help unburden the medical system and increase public safety. Hopefully, it will help more patients be able to stay at home in an effort to “flatten the curve.”

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Tesla starts delivering the Model Y

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The Model Y shares a lot in common with the Model 3 sedan, but it’s arguably a more reasonably priced alternative to the Model X. You don’t get the X’s performance, more elaborate in-cabin tech or those signature falcon wing doors, but you do get considerably more room than the 3 with an option for seven seats.

The deliveries are good news for Tesla, which hoped to keep its momentum going through 2020. With that said, it might not have the same optimism now that the coronavirus outbreak is affecting production in multiple industries. It’s not clear how long Tesla can maintain high output, or that customers will be thinking about car purchases in the current climate.

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Amazon will hire 100,000 workers to keep up with the surge in demand

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The company will increase pay for US workers by $2 per hour through the end of April. Those in the UK will see a £2 per hour increase, and Amazon will boost pay by approximately €2 per hour in many EU countries. The company says the pay bump represents an investment of over $350 million across the US, Europe and Canada.

Amazon is looking to fill both full- and part-time positions, and it says it’s happy to take anyone who has lost their job in the hospitality, food service and travel industries as a part of this crisis. “We want those people to know we welcome them on our teams until things return to normal and their past employer is able to bring them back,” Amazon wrote.

As far as keeping its employees safe, Amazon says it has “taken measures to promote social distancing in the workplace” and ramped up cleaning. But it’s hard to say how much good that will do. Amazon doesn’t have the best track record for keeping its employees safe, and according to MIT, the virus can live on a cardboard delivery box for at least a day.

Amazon is encouraging employees who can work from home to do so, and all employees diagnosed with COVID-19 or placed into quarantine will receive up to two weeks of pay. Additional financial support may be available through the Amazon Relief Fund, which received an initial $25 million investment.

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Uber Eats waives delivery fees for over 100,000 independent restaurants

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Uber Eats is also launching daily marketing campaigns to promote delivery from local restaurants, especially those that are new to the app. It will allow restaurants of all sizes to opt into daily payments on all Uber Eats orders, rather than weekly billing, and it has committed 300,000 free meals on Uber Eats to first responders and healthcare workers in the US and Canada.

Uber Eats, along with other delivery services like Instacart, Grubhub, Postmates and Seamless, have been encouraging customers to select no-contact delivery. Both Grubhub and Seamless have temporarily suspended commission fees for independent restaurants, as well.

Earlier today, Uber announced that it will offer two weeks of pay to drivers and delivery people who test positive for COVID-19 and those who are forced to quarantine. The company also says that it’s providing them with sanitization products to help limit the spread of the virus.

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Mint Mobile is giving out free data for the next month amid COVID-19

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To get the data, download the Mint Mobile app (Android and iOS), tap the “Account” icon on the bottom right of the interface and then press “Buy more data” under the payment heading. You’ll then have the option to “buy” either a 1GB or 3GB data bucket. Pick the latter option. You’ll need to pay for the data with either a credit or bank card, but then Mint Mobile will refund your purchase. You can continue to add data as you use more, though you’ll need to go through 95 percent of your current allotment before adding another 3GB to your account.

“These last few days have thrown the world into an unprecedented moment of uncertainty where reliable communication is of the utmost importance,” Mint says on its website. “We feel it’s necessary to do something that could possibly help all of us navigate this tough time a little bit better.”

Over the last week, we’ve seen some of the bigger carriers in the US implement similar measures. T-Mobile, for instance, is giving all current customers unlimited data for the next 60 days. As part of the FCC’s Keep Americans Connected Pledge, most carriers and ISPs have also agreed to waive late fees for any individuals and small businesses who can’t pay their bills because of the outbreak.

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Oculus Quest update will make it easier to multitask

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In a thoughtful quality of life tweak, the redesigned menu also makes it easier to access the Quest’s brightness and volume controls. As you can see from the screenshots, how much battery life the headset has left is front and center.

The company is also introducing immersive overlays that allow you to access some functionality, such as the updated universal menu, without returning to the home screen. Facebook claims functionality such as friend requests, casting and live streaming are all easier to access as a result. At first, the feature will be available in WebXR apps you launch from the Oculus Browser and come to other tools and games as developers add support.

Oculus Quest

Lastly, starting with the Oculus browser, you’ll be able to open multiple windows within the same 2D app. To help you to take advantage of this feature, Facebook has added a new control box that allows you to open, close and re-arrange windows. The company says this feature will be available in the Chats and Store apps at a later date.

You’ll be able to try out the new system experience later this month through the experimental features section.

Today would have been the start of the Game Developers Conference. And were it not for the coronavirus outbreak, we would have seen Facebook detail these new features at a keynote. Instead, the company shared the news on the Oculus blog and promised further announcements throughout the rest of the week.

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Samsung Galaxy S20 and S20+ review: Smaller is better

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Performance

The cameras are perhaps the biggest difference between the S20 Ultra and the S20 and S20+. All three phones pack the same Snapdragon 865 processor with 12GB of RAM. There is an upgraded Ultra with 16GB, but that’s kinda overkill when laptops usually come with between 8 and 16GB of RAM.

As I jumped among editing a picture, playing a game and chatting with some friends, the S20 and S20 Plus didn’t so much as hiccup. The S20 also kept up as I shot 8K video while downloading a 1.4GB app over LTE, though it did get quite warm in the process.

I even found the in-screen fingerprint sensors surprisingly fast. Samsung uses ultrasound scanners as opposed to the optical reader in the OnePlus 7T Pro, which some reviewers have complained is slow and frustrating. But I haven’t noticed a significant difference in speed. My main issue has been in trying to get my finger in the right spot to unlock the phone when its screen is off. You’ll find a visual guide showing where to place your finger when the screen turns on, but it’s an extra step in the way of unlocking your phone. I was able to correctly guess where this sensor was sometimes, but more often than not, I missed. I wish Samsung had used Qualcomm’s new fingerprint sensor that’s about twice the size of a thumb and would be much easier to find.

5G today

One of the things Samsung is calling attention to on the S20 lineup is 5G support across all three devices. It’s a signal that the next-gen networking standard is getting ready to go mainstream. That’s a nice story to tell the public, but it’s incomplete. Yes, 5G is here, but coverage isn’t comprehensive yet. It’s also confusing as to what the different types of networking technologies mean, and not everyone knows that mmWave is much faster or that 600MHz covers larger areas. There are too many caveats about mmWave’s limited range or the less impressive speed boost from 600MHz at this point that will confuse the average consumer.

I used the S20 Ultra on Verizon’s 5G network: It’s fast, but coverage is limited. Our S20, meanwhile, came with T-Mobile service (technically, anyway — more on that later). While Verizon only supports mmWave right now, T-Mobile offers both sub-6 and mmWave 5G in New York. Spots with the much faster mmWave are few and far between though. That’s not to mention that the S20 doesn’t support them; only the Plus and Ultra model do.

T-Mobile claims that while 600 MHz 5G will be noticeably faster than LTE, “customers won’t see a dramatic difference” in others. On average though the carrier said there should be a 20 percent download speed boost over its LTE network. Unfortunately, there was an issue with my S20’s SIM card, and I never got to connect to 5G at all. T-Mobile hasn’t been able to provide a solution.

Battery life

What was noticeable on the S20 and S20+ was their long-lasting batteries. Thanks to their large 4,000mAh and 4,500mAh cells, the two phones lasted surprisingly long despite power-draining features like high-refresh rate screens and 5G. I set the displays to 120Hz and consistently got close to two full days out of both flagships. On our battery test, which involves looping a full HD video, the S20 clocked a little more than 12 hours while the Plus hit 15 hours. That’s longer than the Ultra’s eleven-and-a-half-hour mark, and the Plus ties with the Pixel 4 XL.

Samsung Galaxy S20 and S20+ review

S20 vs S20+

The S20 and S20+ are basically the same phone, aside from their differences in size, battery and mmWave support. The Plus also has an additional depth sensor on its back for slightly better portrait mode and AR effects. Are those features worth the extra $200 for the larger phone? Only if you really want a bigger screen, extra long battery life and super fast 5G on T-Mobile (at least, when the network is more mature). Verizon offers a mmWave-compatible S20, so your decision will also depend on what carrier you use. For most people though, the base S20 is plenty of phone.

Wrap-up

In the case of this year’s S20 trio, smaller is so much better. I felt like the Ultra was overkill when it came to size, camera features and, most important, price. At $1,000, the S20 costs the same as the iPhone 11 Pro but more than the Pixel 4 while the S20+ is more expensive than the iPhone 11 Pro Max and Pixel 4 XL. But the S20s are also the best-looking Android flagships around with speedy performance and long battery life. For that money, you’ll also be getting excellent displays and blazing 5G speeds where available. If $1,000 is too much for you, you might want to wait for other options like the rumored Pixel 4a or consider the S10 ($749), which offers most of what you need for hundreds less. Right now though the S20 and S20+ are among the best Android phones money can buy.

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Seagate’s Xbox Series X storage card has 1TB of space, but no price

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The company hasn’t provided pricing or a release date, but we’d expect the Storage Expansion Card to be expensive when it ships. PCIe SSDs in this class are expensive as a general rule (Samsung’s 1TB 970 Evo Plus is on sale for $200 on Amazon as we write this), and making one available in an easily removable format won’t help keep the price down.

As with Microsoft, Seagate is keen to stress that you can’t get away with a USB drive for Series X-optimized games. Conventional external drives just aren’t fast enough — they’ll be fine for unoptimized Xbox One games as well as your Xbox 360 and original Xbox collections, but you’ll be running into technical limits beyond that. Like it or not, this generation will likely be defined by pricey semi-proprietary drives, not to mention eventual revised console models with more built-in storage.

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‘Resident Evil 3’ remake demo will come to consoles and PC on March 19th

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Resident Evil 3 was announced just three months ago, yet it will be out on April 3rd, so it feels like Capcom has been rushing the game to market, but the game has actually been in development for over three years. It seems like the publisher knew it had a hit on its hands while developing Resident Evil 2, which came out in January of 2019.

Capcom also announced an open beta for Resident Evil Resistance, a multiplayer game that comes free with Resident Evil 3. The game allows players to join a group of four “Survivors” or serve as the “Mastermind,” who sets traps to kill off the other players. The beta will run from March 19th until the game’s full launch alongside Resident Evil 3.

It’s certainly a good time to be a gamer. Despite the fact that the current generation of consoles is winding down, the hits seem to keep on coming. And the introduction of the PS5 and Xbox Series X will only bring more new experiences when they launch later this year.

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Intel’s neuromorphic chip learns to ‘smell’ 10 hazardous chemicals

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Using Intel’s Loihi, a neuromorphic chip, the team designed an algorithm based on the brain’s olfactory circuit. When you take a whiff of something, molecules stimulate olfactory cells in your nose. Those cells send signals to the brain’s olfactory system, which then fires off electrical pulses. The researchers were able to mimic that circuitry in Loihi’s silicon circuits.

According to Intel, the chip can identify 10 smells, including acetone, ammonia and methane, even when other strong smells are present. And, Loihi learned each odor with just a single sample. That’s especially impressive, the researchers say, because other deep learning techniques can require 3,000 times more training samples to reach the same level of accuracy.

Their work, profiled in Nature Machine Intelligence today, is a “prime example of contemporary research taking place at the crossroads of neuroscience and artificial intelligence,” said Nabil Imam, a senior research scientist in Intel Labs’ neuromorphic computing group.

Intel and Cornell University are certainly not alone in their efforts to train AI to detect smells. The Google Brain Team is working with perfumers to link scent molecules with perceived smells. Russian researchers are using AI to sniff out deadly gas mixtures, and researchers have tried to recreate the smell of an extinct flower with machine learning.

“Understanding how the brain’s neural circuits solve these complex computational problems will provide important clues for designing efficient and robust machine intelligence,” Imam says. In other words, if we can understand how the brain smells, it may fundamentally change how we design AI.

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